What is the World?

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What is the world, a wildering maze

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What is the World?--a wildering maze,
Where sin hath track'd ten thousand ways,
Her victims to ensnare;
All broad, and winding, and aslope,
All tempting with perfidious hope,
All ending in despair.

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Millions of pilgrims throng those roads,
Bearing their baubles or their loads,
Down to eternal night;
--One only path that never bends,
Narrow, and rough, and steep, ascends
From darkness into light.

Is there no guide to show that path?
The Bible!--He alone who hath
The Bible need not stray;
But He who hath, and will not give
That light of life to all that live,
Himself shall lose the way.

Author: James Montgomery

Montgomery, James, son of John Montgomery, a Moravian minister, was born at Irvine, Ayrshire, Nov. 4, 1771. In 1776 he removed with his parents to the Moravian Settlement at Gracehill, near Ballymena, county of Antrim. Two years after he was sent to the Fulneck Seminary, Yorkshire. He left Fulneck in 1787, and entered a retail shop at Mirfield, near Wakefield. Soon tiring of that he entered upon a similar situation at Wath, near Rotherham, only to find it quite as unsuitable to his taste as the former. A journey to London, with the hope of finding a publisher for his youthful poems ended in failure; and in 1792 he was glad to leave Wath for Shefield to join Mr. Gales, an auctioneer, bookseller, and printer of the Sheffield Register newspap… Go to person page >

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Notes

What is the world? a wildering maze. J. Montgomery. [Holy Scripture a Light.] In his Poetical Works 1851, p. 304, Montgomery dates this hymn “1815": but in his newspaper, the Sheffield Iris, of 1817, he printed it in 3 stanzas of 6 lines, and dated it "February, 1817." Under these circumstances it is difficult to say which of these dates is correct. The hymn was repeated in Montgomery's Greenland and Other Poems, 1819, p. 187; his Christian Psalmist, 1825, No. 548; his Poetical Works, 1828, and his Original Hymns, 1853, No. 26. It is also found in Cotterill’s Selection, 1819, and in several of the older and modern hymnbooks. It is not, however, a good example of Montgomery's powers as a writer of hymns.